Tag

automation

If you read one future of work article this month, make it this one. Really good interview touching key topics of how we will work in the future and what the change in technology and business models will mean for employment models and of course how we should adapt our approach towards education. Really good read, smart thoughts! Here you go:

“Smart machines, businesses as platforms, and a waitress at Perkins Pancake House—all of these and more figure into Friedman’s buoyant riff on where the future of work could be taking us. […] I couldn’t resist reaching out to Tom to see if he would speak with Cathy Engelbert, CEO of Deloitte, and me on this particular topic. We ended up covering a very broad terrain with Tom and, in his usual fashion, he brought these diverse trends to life with compelling stories…”

Five years from now, over one-third of skills (35%) that are considered important in today’s workforce will have changed. By 2020, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have brought us advanced robotics and autonomous transport, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced materials, biotechnology and genomics.

These developments will transform the way we live, and the way we work. Some jobs will disappear, others will grow and jobs that don’t even exist today will become commonplace. What is certain is that the future workforce will need to align its skillset to keep pace. A new Forum report, The Future of Jobs, looks at the employment, skills and workforce strategy for the future…

Guy Raz: “I ask myself this question a lot which is: Is this the future we want? Have we gotten to a place where the train has left the station, where we don’t really have much of a choice about where the future is heading?”

Erik Brynjolfsson: “Well let me try to cheer you up a little bit. Let’s just step back and look at the fundamentals. What are you and I are talking about? We re talking about a world with vastly more wealth, vastly more power to solve all sorts of problems. Vastly less need for us to work. Most routine tasks could be eliminiated. Shame on us, shame on us, if we mess that up and turn that into a bad thing. Wouldn’t that be the worst irony in the world where we take more wealth and less work and say ‘Oh, what a terrible thing?’ I think we can essentially eliminate poverty from planet earth, we can cure most deseases. And the global millennium goals, we are on track to beat them and eliminate severe poverty. There are a lot of positive trends. I think the world in 25 years could be a much better version of the world we have today. But the role of humans would still be fundamentally at the center of that.”

Robots are getting cheaper and smaller and, as a result, sales have grown significantly over the past year, particularly in North America, as more companies move manufacturing operations closer to U.S. markets. North American manufacturing companies bought a total of 9,773 industrial robots, valued at approximately $516 million, in the first quarter of 2017. That means 32 percent more robots were bought this year than at the same time in 2016 — it’s the strongest first quarter on record for robots ordered by North American companies, according to the Robotic Industries Association…

The digital revolution is in full swing. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Soon, the things around us, possibly even our clothing, also will be connected with the Internet. It is estimated that in 10 years’ time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money…

Historian Yuval Noah Harari makes a bracing prediction: just as mass industrialization created the working class, the AI revolution will create a new unworking class. The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans? This is not an entirely new question…

In February 1975, a group of geneticists gathered in a tiny town on the central coast of California to decide if their work would bring about the end of the world. These researchers were just beginning to explore the science of genetic engineering, manipulating DNA to create organisms that didn’t exist in nature, and they were unsure how these techniques would affect the health of the planet and its people. So, they descended on a coastal retreat called Asilomar, a name that became synonymous with the guidelines they laid down at this meeting—a strict ethical framework meant to ensure that biotechnology didn’t unleash the apocalypse…

I would like to share some of my thoughts on key developments that I believe will determine our lives in the upcoming two decades. Almost all of this is fueled by ever more accelerating technological progress and there are a lot of opportunities in it. As well as significant challenges.